Comments on Food For Thought: A Meta Feast

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It's tantalising how little information there is about the beginning of the Second Age, isn't it! Elros' establishment of a new society (and his early days as a king who was essentially a stranger to his people) must have been endlessly fascinating. I completely agree with your assessment of the period as a time of uncertainty as well as optimism. And I really like your speculations in the final paragraph. It makes a lot of sense to me that those among the Orcs who were released from the domination of Morgoth and managed to escape the inheritance of Sauron would perhaps try to establish a life of their own, or even more likely try to find healing and peace in Lórien. Now I'd really love to read a story about that.
Food for thought indeed! Thanks a lot for sharing it!

Yes - I would have expected more, given that early Numenor is what really sets the stage for much of the subsequent history of Men. (I wonder if this is a product of Tolkien not having thought much on this period, or one of those things he meant to get around to writing and never quite did. Or - and I don't rule this out - I missed something?) The last paragraph didn't quite come out of nowhere - I've thought about orcs before, but more in a post-Return of the King way. Then I realized that anything that would apply in that timeframe would logically apply to the post-War of Wrath time period as well, with Morgoth gone and Sauron possibly initially sincere about repentance and at the very least on good behavior for the time being... Thanks for commenting!

As they were of elven stock originally, there is no reason to suppose they would not be capable of living peacefully without the distorting influence of Morgoth or Sauron acting on them.

Well, that is an fascinating concept. I have never been one to buy the idea that orcs were corrupted elves. But, hey, knock yourself. I am willing to read it in a fictional or non-fiction context. (Dawn's Rumil in her novel Another Man's Cage is a moving and actually quite heroic half-orc.) My position remains that there is no definitive canon explanation of the origin of orcs although CT offers some contradictory theories in Morgoth's Ring and Unfinished Tales at least. But, phew, yucky! I hates them all!

Thanks for offering this--it contains a lot of interesting information and is very readable and useful also!



Thank you!

I've never seen much way around it - if Morgoth couldn't create life, only twist what already existed, then the only options for the origins of orcs are that they are fallen maiar (which doesn't seem likely, given that both elves and men are able to fight and kill them) or that the supposition of the elves given in the Silmarillion ("Of the Coming of the Elves and the Captivity of Melkor") is correct, and Morgoth made orcs from captured elves. I generally write the latter.

The first recipe for jam I ever encountered dated to the 1st century AD and used honey. I was looking for one when so much of one's time in writing Tolkien fanfic was engaged in stockpiling plausible explanations for any world-building one might do that ventured outside of explicit canon references. (No nostalgia for those bad-old-days! Today's fandom allows more creativity in general.)

This is a really fun and entertaining piece of expository writing. I will probably refer to it in the future! Thanks for sharing.




Thank you!

1st century jam recipes? Cool! I'm not usually so rigorous in my world-building, but when writing meta I'm fairly conservative and try not to say anything I can't back up. Not being a historian of food, I hesitated to say that most jam recipes use some form of sugar, as I felt that was just inviting someone who knew far more on the subject to pop up with counterexamples!

 

I shouldn' be reading this now. I am too hungry! Hobbit food sounds really good and satisfying at the moment.

I am sure that you've probably heard me ranting or being taunted by my fandom friends about entered into a huge fandom wank started by someone trashing my reference to cheese in Beleriand in my novel A New Day. My critic claimed she abandoned my story the moment she encountered my description of Elves eating cheese at Lake Mithrim. Periodically, I think about it and either laugh at myself or fume at her depending upon my mood.

Hey, whatever. There is nothing in canon to indicate that the Elves in Rivendell were vegan as Peter Jackson implies in The Hobbit. 

One of the things we know about Dwarves is they liked cheese, as you noted above, and "Roaring fires, malt beer, red meat off the bone." Oh, whoops, sorry! That was Peter Jackson again and not Tolkien!

Anyway, I enjoyed this piece very much (too much I am sure!). Thanks again. I am getting a real kick out of this series.



Thank you! I'm glad you're enjoying it!

I think I've seen allusions to the cheese incident before, but I didn't realize it had started due to one of your stories. (I don't find the not reading past the cheese as strange as needing to share with the author that cheese was the thing that made them stop reading - people are odd sometimes!)

I found a quick and dirty reference to the cookbook it is available online through Gutenberg (not that you NeeD it!).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apicius -  De re coquinaria (On the Subject of Cooking)

Look at this table of contents--just for fun.

The Latin text is organized in ten books with Greek titles, in an arrangement similar to that of a modern cookbook:

  1. Epimeles — The Careful Housekeeper
  2. Sarcoptes — The Meat Mincer, Ground-beef
  3. Cepuros — The Gardener, Vegetables
  4. Pandecter — Many Ingredients
  5. Ospreon — Pulse, Legumes
  6. Aeropetes — Birds, Poultry
  7. Polyteles — The Gourmet
  8. Tetrapus — The Quadruped, Four-legged animals
  9. Thalassa — The Sea, Sea-food
  10. Halieus — The Fisherman

Sometimes Wikipedia is awesome!